Thursday, September 4, 2014

Poetry
sessions offer the widest variety of imaginative expression for our
readers. They pose problems, as well, for the mind wants to get to the
bottom of things, and often the poems are elusive as to their
meaning. They suggest different things for different readers.

Elusive

Poems in translation are even more difficult to appreciate for they have
been shorn of their original sounds, and perhaps had their language
conventions turned upside down by the process of translation. Does
Azmi's Urdu formalism make sense in English? Does Césaire's
prose poem convey the nostalgia of the French when translated? Can
Akhmatova be divorced from her soft Russian inflections and yet yield
her treasures?

Nine
readers try to show what can be achieved, mixing American and British
writers with a variety of poets from all over the world.

The
reading opened with a request that members should introduce
themselves once again, since many newcomers and old timers had missed
out on each other at the earlier readings.

Gopa
in her introduction said that it was because of KRG that she was
attempting to develop a liking for poetry; but poems do not give her
the same satisfaction she derives from books. Thommo concurred with
Gopa saying that he reads poetry only at KRG sessions;
wrestling with poetry stopped with high school for many people. Gopa called
Thommo a reluctant lover of poems. Pamela said she loves poetry and
this may be on account of her love for music. The rendition of a song
is never deep if one does not understand the profundity in the lyrics, she
said, implying that songs are filled with poetry at the core.

Talitha

She
began the reading with Anna Akhmatova’s poems: Song
of The Last Meeting
and Three
Things Enchanted Him.
The ellipses and the image of evensong in the second poem were
discussed. Talitha said that evensong was an Anglican ritual and for
a Russian poet to write about it was surprising. Gopa said that the
poem was in translation and hence such an anomaly could occur.

Gopa

She
read The
Battle of Blenheim
by Robert Southey from a book of poems that belonged to her
mother-in-law. Southey’s relationship to Winston Churchill and the
Marlborough family was discussed. The poem celebrates the fact that a
war victory is far more important than the lives that are lost
because of it. When did this sentiment change? Thommo, with his
inimitable wit, said that though the battle of Blenheim was fought on the
continent, the castle in memory of that victorious battle stands in
England; this is like what George Bush would have done, for had he planned a war on Ukraine, American troops would have landed in New Zealand.

Sreelatha
said that the beauty of poetry was that it had many voices.

Thommo

He
read W.H. Auden’s Partition
on
Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the man who
was responsible for drawing the line that partitioned India and
Pakistan. It was topical. Priya said that everywhere the British had
done a messy job of drawing borders, the war in Gaza being a case in point.

Ankush

He
read the modern American poet William Carlos Williams. WCW belonged to
a group of modern American poets who observed and celebrated ordinary
life.

Pamela

She
read Kamala Das’ A
Losing Battle.
Pamela said that the poem was inspired by an incident to which the
poet was privy. The incident was about a young girl playing
hopscotch. The innocent girl is called by her mother, half way
through the game, to perform a task, after which she returned to
continue the game but looked dazed. It seems in between she suffered
some sexual abuse by an elder. The poet questions the abuse that
women suffer silently and the different identities they live with.

While
this may be Pamela's take on the poem, Joe on re-reading it several
times found no trace of a hint of sexual abuse of children. Joe's
conclusion is there is none.

Whether
KD was led to her feminist stance by seeing child abuse in others, or
having it happen to her, is a different issue, one of biography. This
poem is about something else:

How
can my love hold him when the otherFlaunts
a gaudy lust and is lionessTo
his beast? Men are worthless, to trap themUse
the cheapest bait of all, but neverLove,
which in a woman must mean tearsAnd
a silence in the blood.

She
seems to suggest 4 things

1.
Another woman ('lioness') has taken away the man she loved

2.
The bait used to lure him was 'gaudy lust'

3.
Men can always be enticed by this cheap stratagem

4.
Men are not worth investing the real love of a woman, which entails
suffering ('tears')

That's
as much as one can read in the text. It's the cry of a woman scorned.

What
was the raw material of its making? - perhaps her whole life, or one
small experience, who knows? Anyway, why the rush to read a woman's
biography in a single short poem?

Sujatha

She
read Aimé
Césaire,
a Black French poet from Martinique. Sujatha read excerpts of the
prose poem, Return
To My Native Land
that reflects the angst the poet felt when he returned from Paris to
his native land and tried to accept its reality in comparison to the
high Parisian life. Sujatha said Aimé
Césaire
is considered to be the father of Négritude,
which was the origin of the 'Black is Beautiful' movement.

Aimé
Césaire,
poet, playwright, politician, and one of the most influential authors
from the French-speaking Caribbean, was born in Basse-Pointe,
Martinique, in the French Caribbean. His father, Fernand Elphège,
was educated as teacher, but worked as a manager of a sugar estate.
Eléonore, his mother, was a seamstress.Césaire's
family was poor, but his parents invested in the education of their
children.

Césaire
grew up in Martinique before leaving for Paris to continue his
studies. During the time that Césaire
grew up in the islands, African identity was something largely absent
from both literature and everyday lexicon. While many of the
residents of the Caribbean had dark skin and were the descendants of
slaves, this heritage was generally regarded as a mark of shame. The
dominant trend in society was to distance oneself and the family as
far as possible from African origins. This meant speaking the
language of the colonising country, France, reading European
literature, and attending schools strictly run in the fashion of the
colonial country.

At
the Lyceé
Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Césaire
studied African history and culture. It was during this period that
he
began
to realise the need for a redefinition of black consciousness, one
which would include reclaiming the history of the people and a strengthened
sense of identity, independent of colonial powers.

The
prose poem, Return
To My Native Land
(original in French), which explores themes of self and cultural
identity, is the first expression of the concept of Négritude.

Sreelatha

She
confessed her love of Urdu poetry and read her translation of Kaifi
Azmi’s Aurat,
which deals with the wish of the poet that his ideal woman should be on an equal footing with men. Her translation brought out the zeal of
the poet well, and the group commended her.

Vijay

In
his recent vacation to Mussoorie Vijay tried unsuccessfully to meet
Ruskin Bond by walking up to a book store on the Mall, which the
writer frequented, three days on the trot. Then he learnt that the
poet and story-writer was unwell. The shopkeeper seeing Vijay’s
enthusiasm and disappointment at not meeting the poet gifted him with
a signed copy of the writer's works –
a book of stories and poems. Vijay read Love
Lyric for Bindy Devi.

The
group expressed surprise to hear Ruskin Bond wrote poetry, but Vijay
said that he too learnt about the poetry of the writer from the book.
The two poems present a very different side of the author, who is
generally known as a writer of children’s stories. Vijay said that
Ruskin Bond, a bachelor, was once asked about his love life and he
replied, “I keep falling in love.” The poem is honest and true.
The soft romance the lines depict seem taken from real life, the
group felt, and Gopa said that Priya would love it. Priya agreed
completely and asked who wouldn't enjoy such delicate emotions?

Priya

She
read poetry related to tea. She chose Chinese tea poems, one classic
and one modern. The old Chinese poem by Lu Tong of the Tang Dynasty
is well known, she said and the modern one she chanced upon was Love
Lyrics of Tea
by American Taiwanese writer Dominic Cheung. Tea is not a common
subject in modern verse. The moot point in Cheung’s beautiful lines
was that the poem is erotic, a charge that Sheila Cherian felt was
perverse. Sensuous, yes, but not erotic. Ankush said that the lines,
“sink down, to assemble in my depths” was the farthest one could
go in classifying the poem as erotic.

The
first volume in The Taiwanese Modern Literature Series, Drifting
consists of translations from Cheung's collection Drifters,
first published in Taipei in 1986. This collection centers upon the
metaphors of drifting, in which language and meaning, wander between
two worlds, the East and the West, between the private home and a
shared country. The metaphor, of course, also brings up the
disillusionment with contemporary Taiwanese culture and the seemingly
impossible dream of a shared homeland with China. Cheung, a Professor of Asian
Studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, first came to the United States as a graduate student in 1967.
He sees himself as an American writing in Chinese, and as both a Chinese
poet and an Asian American writer.

About
the Poem: Love Lyrics of Tea The
act of plain hot water and dried leaves becoming tea together is
really rather magical — like sex. The author of this poem insists he
meant nothing erotic in his description here; and he ought to know.
All the same, the description is both graphic and sensual. It is hard
to ignore the implication that two imperfect entities are merging
here to become something more, something better than either would
ever be alone. Read and make up your own mind. This is not a bad
definition of romantic—or, if you prefer, just plain
physical—love.Dominic
Cheung graduated from the National Chengchi University in Taiwan,
then studied in the US, where he earned his PhD from the University
of Washington in 1974. He is the author of many scholarly books and
papers and, under the pseudonym of Chang T’so (Zhang Cuo) is a
professional poet who has published more than 17 collections of
poetry. He is currently Professor of East Asian Languages at the
University of Southern California.

Lú
Tóng was the secondary sage of tea, after Lù Yǔ, the primary sage
of tea. This is one of the most famous tea poems ever, and the Song
of Seven Cups
is about one quarter to a third of the entire poem Taking
Up the Pen to Thank Mèng Jiànyì for Sending New Tea.
I suppose the name of the tea vendor, Seven Cups, comes from this
poem. If anyone knows of any extant English translations, I'd love to
compare. Also please leave comments on how the translation could be
bettered. I did not use any work in English, but did refer to some
explanatory notes from the two Chinese sources listed
below.http://huaib.com/rensheng/7485.html

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partitionBetween two peoples fanatically at odds,With their different diets and incompatible gods."Time," they had briefed him in London, "is short. It's too lateFor mutual reconciliation or rational debate:The only solution now lies in separation.The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,That the less you are seen in his company the better,So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you."

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and dayPatrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,He got down to work, to the task of settling the fateOf millions. The maps at his disposal were out of dateAnd the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,But there was no time to check them, no time to inspectContested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forgetThe case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Ankush:
William
Carlos Williams

Lines

Leaves
are graygreen,the glass broken, bright green.

Between
Walls

the
back wingsof the

hospital wherenothing

will
grow liecinders

In which shinethe broken

pieces
of a greenbottle

The
Red Wheelbarrow

so
much depends

upon

a red
wheel

barrow

glazed
with rain

water

beside
the white

chickens.

Smell

Oh
strong-ridged and deeply hollowed

nose
of mine! what will you not be smelling?

What
tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,

always
indiscriminate, always unashamed,

and
now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled

poplars:
a festering pulp on the wet earth

beneath
them. With what deep thirst

we
quicken our desires

to
that rank odor of a passing springtime!

Can
you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors

for
something less unlovely? What girl will care

for
us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?

Must
you taste everything? Must you know everything?

Must
you have a part in everything?

Danse
Russe

If I
when my wife is sleeping

and
the baby and Kathleen

are
sleeping

and
the sun is a flame-white disc

in
silken mists

above
shining trees,—

if I
in my north room

dance
naked, grotesquely

before
my mirror

waving
my shirt round my head

and
singing softly to myself:

“I
am lonely, lonely.

I was
born to be lonely,

I am
best so!”

If I
admire my arms, my face,

my
shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against
the yellow drawn shades,—

Who
shall say I am not

the
happy genius of my household?

Pamela
Kamala Das

A
Losing Battle

How
can my love hold him when the otherFlaunts
a gaudy lust and is lionessTo
his beast? Men are worthless, to trap themUse
the cheapest bait of all, but neverLove,
which in a woman must mean tearsAnd
a silence in the blood.

1If
I were boiling waterAnd you were tea leaves,Then all your
fragrance would dependUpon my lack of taste.

2Let your
shrivelingLoosen up within me and unfold;Let my
infusionSmoothe the wrinkles from your face

3We would
need to be hot, even boilingTo dissolve inside each other.

4We
would need to hideFace to face under water, twisting and twining,
In a moment of teaBefore we decide which color to
become.

5No matter how long you might float and
swirlUnstableEventually you would(Oh, gently)Sink
downTo assemble in my depths.

6In that momentYour
bitterest teardropWould become my sweetestMouthful of tea.

Song
of Seven Cups from
the poem Taking
Up the Pen to Thank Mèng Jiànyì for Sending New Teaby
Lú Tóng of the Táng Dynasty

One
bowl moistens the lips and throat;Two bowls shatters loneliness
and melancholy;Three bowls, thinking hard, one produces five
thousand volumes;Four bowls, lightly sweating, the iniquities of
a lifetime disperse towards the pores.Five bowls cleanses muscles
and tendons;Six bowls accesses the realm of spirit;One cannot
finish the seventh bowl, but feels only a light breeze spring up
under the arms.

Sujatha
WarrierAimé
Césaire

Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land

my
negritude is not a stone

nor
deafness flung against the clamor of the day

my
negritude is not a white speck of dead water

on
the dead eye of the earth

my
negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it
plunges into the red flesh of the soil

it
plunges into the blazing flesh of the sky

my
negritude riddles with holes

the
dense affliction of its worthy patience.

Return
to My Native Land (Excerpts
from the prose poem)

At
the end of the small hours: this town, flat, displayed, brought down
by its common-sense, inert, breathless under its geometric burden of
crosses, forever starting again, sullen to its fate, dumb, thwarted
in every degree, incapable of growing as the sap of its earth would
have it grow, set upon, gnawed, reduced, cheating its own fauna and
flora.

At
the end of the small hours: this town, flat, displayed...

And
in this town a clamouring crowd, a stranger to its own cry as the
town, inert, is a stranger to its own movement and meaning, a crowd
without concern, disowning its own true cry, the cry you’d like to
hear because only that cry belongs to it, because that cry you know
lives deep in some lair of darkness and pride in this disowning town,
in this crowd deaf to its own cry of hunger and misery, revolt and
hatred, in this crowd so strangely garrulous and dumb.

In
this disowning town, this strange crowd which does not gather, does
not mingle: this crowd that can so easily disengage itself, make off,
slip away. This crowd which doesn’t know how to crowd, this crowd
so perfectly alone beneath the sun: this crowd like a woman whose
lyrical walk you have noticed but who suddenly calls upon a
hypothetical rain and commands it not to fall; or makes the sign of
the cross without visible reason; or assumes the sudden grave
animality of a peasant woman urinating on her feet, stiff legs apart.

...

At
the end of the small hours, this town, flat, displayed . . .

It
crawls on its hands without the slightest wish ever to stand up and
pierce the sky with its protest. The backs of the houses are afraid
of the fire-truffled sky, their foundations are afraid of the
drowning mud. Scraps of houses that have settled to stand between
shocks and undermining. And yet this town advances. Every day it
grazes further beyond the tide of its tiled corridors, shame-faced
blinds, sticky courtyards, dripping paintwork. And petty suppressed
scandals, petty shames kept quiet and petty immense hatreds knead the
narrow streets into lumps and hollows where the gutter pulls a face
among the excrement . . .

At
the end of the small hours: Life flat on its face, miscarried dreams
and nowhere to put them, the river of life listless in its hopeless
bed, not rising or falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably empty, the
heavy impartial shadow of boredom creeping over the quality of all
things, the air stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single
bird.

At
the end of the small hours: another house in a very narrow street
smelling very bad, a tiny house with, within its entrails of rotten
wood, shelters rats by the dozen and the gale of my six brothers and
sisters, a cruel little house whose implacability panics us at the
end of every month, and my strange father nibbled by a single misery
whose name I’ve never known, my father whom an unpredictable
witchcraft soothes into sad tenderness or exalts into fierce flames
of anger; and my mother whose feet, daily and nightly, pedal, pedal
for our never-tiring hunger, I am even woken by those never-tiring
feet pedalling by night and the Singer whose teeth rasp into the soft
flesh of the night, the Singer which my mother pedals, pedals for our
hunger night and day.

At
the end of the small hours, my father, my mother, and over them the
house which is a shack splitting open with blisters like a peach-tree
tormented by blight, and the roof worn thin, mended with bits of
paraffin cans, this roof pisses swamps of rust on to the grey sordid
stinking mess of straw, and when the wind blows, these ill-matched
properties make a strange noise, like the sputter of frying, then
like a burning log plunged into water with the smoke from the twigs
twisting away. . . . And the bed of planks on its legs of kerosene
drums, a bed with elephantiasis, my grandmother’s bed with its
goatskin and its dried banana leaves and its rags, a bed with
nostalgia as a mattress and above it a bowl full of oil, a candle-end
with a dancing flame and on the bowl, in golden letters, the word
MERCI.

Posted by
Management - Learning from Experiences by Reflection
at
5:36 AM